THE OVERVIEW

Mr. Wilson's 2025 offering shows his return to science and space perspective themes as well as a return to the kind of music he was making in the early years of his Porcupine Tree infancy: the Pink Floyd and Beatles-inspired stuff before his collaborators became as important to the music as his own ideas and inputs.

1. "Objects Outlive Us" (23:17) (44.25/50): - "No Monkey's Paw" (1:59) - opens with electronica vocal, sounding like Steven's attempt at a James Blake song. Not bad! (4.375/5) - "The Buddha of the Modern Age" (2:26) - Paul McCartney-sounding piano, cymbal play, chant-proclamation vocals delivered at first via solo voce but then with banked full "world" choir. (4.375/5) - "Objects: Meanwhile" (6:31) - harkening back to Steven's "current events" perspective songs with acoustic guitar strumming, piano chord hits, big synth and guitar chords and Steven's astute and poetic observational commentary over the top. Randy McStine's microtonal guitar play in the instrumental section, pedal steel guitar beneath the second verse. Macho-bass leads the way into a heavier motif in the second half of the instrumental passage. Then strumming acoustic guitars, synth and piano inputs resurface for Steven to continue his observational rant. (8.875/10) - "The Cicerones / Ark" (3:42) - a mathematical weave of arpeggiating piano and guitar guitar chords peppered with bouncy synth and distorted electric guitar flourishes leads into this slow build motif over which Steven & Co. chant a list with repetitious urgency. (8.75/10) - "Cosmic Sons of Toil" (3:00) - continue the bouncy (fast-oscillating volume control) synth chords only add chunky jazz bass, sophisticated syncopated drumming, complex chord progressions, and solos from rhythm guitar (Steven), lead guitar (Randy), keyboard (Adam), and some pretty awesome bass and drum play. This is pretty fresh: not unlike the genius Steven was trying to express on Grace for Drowning. (8.875/10) - "No Ghost on the Moor / Heat Death of the Universe" (6:00) - opens with deep space synth before Steven (or some other male voice) joins in with a high falsetto voice at 0:30. Steven's normal voice (sounding a lot like Steve Hogarth) proceeds over "Sky Moves Sideways" echo snare beat and synth washes. Randy McStine microtonal infinity guitar solo in the third minute is interesting and unusual. Pink Floyd/Radiohead "Subterranean Homesick Alien" sound and chord palette rises to dominate the fifth minute as Randy's guitar goes Frippertronic. I like it. (But then, I loved "Sky" and "Homesick Alien.") (9/10)

2. "The Overview" (18:27) : - "Perspective" - trip-hoppy instrumental space music with astronomy science facts & distances being recited over the top. Steven is using a lot of very familiar sounds, chords, and chord progressions (from his own previous works). - "A Beautiful Infinity I" - strumming acoustic guitars with Steven singing over the voice. Again, so much of this we've heard before in Steven's previous works; the effects, the voice styling, the guitars, the Pink Floyd chords, the Beatles/XTC sound effects and engineering techniques. - "Borrowed Atoms" - - "A Beautiful Infinity II" - Some of this even goes back as far as "The Sky Moves Sideways" and "Every Home Is Wired" and "Stars Die." - "Infinity Measured in Moments" - the coolest movement of the suite with its syncopated rhythm pattern, layered synths, guitars, and choral vocals. There feels some originality in this mélange. I love the presence/use of ukelele/mandolin and banjo! - "Permanence" - space ambient synth chords that sound like the sexy love music Vangelis put in his Blade Runner soundtrack. Even the love-time sax is fitting. Just waiting for Barry White's voice to enter to narrate the foreplay. There is so much that I love about this song--just as there is so much that I love about everything Steven did in the 1990s and his more recent solo discography--yet there are elements of everything that rub me a little the wrong way: much of which results in my disappointing reaction of "I've heard this before" or "he's used this before." (35.5/40)

Total Time 41:44

My single most dominant "complaint" about the music on this album is how cut-and-paste patchworked it is with so much of Steven's past sounds, riffs, "tricks," and styles. Otherwise, this is another brilliant "time capsule" of art. My second much smaller "complaint" is that the perspectives offered here on The Overview are not as obvious as they were on Fear of a Blank Planet or Hand. Cannot. Erase. --two albums that I consider among the best representatives of 21st Century "first world" Homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps Steven's perspectives are a bit more subjective and isolated than before and, thus, sometimes tough to interpret.

B-/3.5 stars; despite the rather low rating, I still greatly admire this album as a wonderful representative of the genius of the one and only Steven Wilson. I'll rate it up to four stars as it is an excellent exhibition of progressive rock music that most every prog lover will enjoy and despite the over-familiarity of a lot of its ideas and sounds for we who know Steven's discography fairly well.

Steven Wilson's latest solo album was much heralded as a return to prog sensibilities in his solo work, and it kind of is and kind of isn't. It consists of two side-long tracks with different subsections, but anyone expecting something high on proggy complexity and a retro sound should remember that Steven Wilson was the original Marillion fan, and Misplaced Childhood had exactly the same structure but also included a bona fide pop hit in that structure.

I don't think there's a Kayleigh here, though - but nor is there a Close To the Edge. Instead, The Overview is a decidedly different animal, weaving its way through ambient textures, propulsive post-rock soundscapes, flashes of the sort of indie-rock-with-prog-inflections style that Porcupine Tree delved into on Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun, easy listening jazz, and more besides.

Wilson doing this project under his own name perhaps makes sense because it really doesn't quite fit into any of his band projects, though there's aspects of many of them here, from dream pop vocals and trip-hop beats worthy of No-Man to New Prog moments that could have come off a late 1990s Porcupine Tree album to the sort of ambient textures that Bass Communion may have touched on, and so on and so forth.

Where it doesn't particularly touch on is the heavier, crunchier sound of Porcupine Tree's more metal-oriented phase - the In Absentia era and its followups - or any of the aspects of that sound that Wilson has drawn on elsewhere in his solo career; there isn't something like Raider II from Grace For Drowning on here. On the other hand, it can hardly be accused of being a left turn into synthpop either. Ultimately, if there's one lesson that Wilson has taught us with these solo albums, it's that he's going to do what he likes with such releases and not be bound by past precedent or the expectations a band project might carry with it. But for my money, he's put out another top-tier effort.

Judging by early reviews of this album I was expecting something a lot worse than it actually is. For the most part it's a return to 'prog' for Steven after the experimental and largely underwelming last few releases which didn't seem to have any real point. I appreciate that it would be hard for anyone to better such releases as Hand Cannot Erase and The Raven That Refused To Sing but it would be nice to know he cares at least!

The Overview is defintely for me a return to form. He is well known to be a Pink Floyd fan (perhaps his favourite band) and this has definite echoes (see what I did there) of the early spacey psyche rock of Floyd. Perhaps he 'bottles' it slightly but not that much. The opening 23 minute suite Objects Outlive Us is as good as anything he has done for 10 years. Great drumming from Russell Holzman especially oushining Craig Blundell who appears on the second piece. It feels to me that a lot more effort went into this part of the album and maybe it could have stretched to being a one album track? The second ( and only other track) is the Overview coming in at 18 minutes long. This is where the album gets slightly derailed and is a much more disjointed long song. Contains some unecessary contributions from wifey Rolem quoting off scientifiic information and then a perfunctory outro. Craig Blundell (not my favourite drummer) takes over the stool and he's about as blunt as usual. This track feels a lot more cobbled together in order to make an album.

Overall though there is enough here to justify a rating of around 8.5/10 (9.5 for Objects Outlive Us/ 7.5 for The Overview)

The concept of the album is about our perspective looking at the earth from space and how it can create a sense of joy in some people and a feeling of emptiness in others. The album has 2 long songs; the first one is related to humanity and the second to science. This explains why we are in front of 2 different atmospheres on those songs. 

 

The first song starts at a low pace with vocals and piano, and it takes a while before we can hear the guitars. Some more upbeat music starts with the bass and some cool synth effects. Then there is a long silence at the 11:00 mark. The guitar takes more space with a solo. I enjoy the buildup in this song that ends peacefully. The second track is spacey at the beginning in an Ozric Tentacles style with electronic effects and the narration of Steve's wife. If you enjoy ambient music, you will enjoy this; if not, then the second half will please you more when the drums kick in and the guitar has more space. It's here that we can hear some nice keyboard solos. The beginning of this second song reminds me also of Porcupine Tree's "The Sky Moves Sideways" and some bits of "Dark Side of the Moon." 

 

So, we have here a proggy album, but some may be disappointed if you expect a more rock-oriented album. It's more on the line of "Harmony Codex" while maintaining some of the sound of earlier albums. But in the end, it must be enjoyed for its cinematic feel with some new things and some old things from Steven. While I am not excited by the story, the music has enough quality to satisfy me. I prefer the first song because I prefer to be more on the earth than in space... 

Steven Wilson enters 2025 with a dazzling new studio album aiming to be a contemporary musical interpretation of the so-called "overview effect" experienced by astronauts seeing the Earth from space, an experience described as deeply moving and emotional, which is often the case with Wilson's musical ventures. This is the British musician's eighth solo album and is a very welcome and warmly-received return to a more psychedelic-progressive style of writing, at times even reminiscent of his earliest experiments with Porcupine Tree (thinking of 'The Sky Moves Sideways' or 'Metanoia'), and is ideally in a format he has never tackled before as the album is composed of just two lengthy pieces of music, both of which are tied to the overarching concept of the aforementioned "overview effect". Alongside Wilson one shall find the usual cast of collaborators in the likes of Adam Holzman, Craig Blundell and Randy McStine, with Theo Travis making a brief appearance, together with Willow Beggs, Niko Tsonev and Rotem Wilson.

The first part of 'The Overview' album is the 23-minute piece titled 'Objects Outlive Us', a cathartic, complex and incredibly diverse movement that is made up of eight different bits, although the entire piece (and the whole album, in fact) works as a cohesive whole and should be seen as such. Starting off with a choral, enchanting intro, the song gradually moves to a more traditional Wilson-esque progression, with loads of atmospheric keys, haunting acoustic guitars and refined melodies, topped by the picturesque lyrics of Andy Partridge. A more avant-garde instrumental sections awaits the listener later on, similar to some of the material on 'The Harmony Codex', then drifting away into space on the wings of a spacious guitar solo, one of the best on a Steven Wilson recording, authored by McStine. The title track comes second here and is an 18-minute-long movement structured in six parts - this is a much wider, more atmospheric and fluid piece of music, with some spoken word from Wilson's wife and a prevalent use of various effects, synths, and keyboards. An interesting counterbalance to the first part of the album, together with which it forms a very endearing, calming and fascinatingly enticing musical experience, elevated perhaps by the fact that this album is much more pertinent to the progressive roots of the artist yet intelligently claiming enough of his more recent experiments with electronica.

Without completely abandoning the electronic influences of his recent albums, "The Overview" marks Steven Wilson's return to what he does best: outstanding progressive rock!

Here, we find only two unique and lengthy tracks, split into more standard-length songs on disc 2. While these may not represent the instrumental excellence of "The Raven That Refused to Sing" or "Hand. Cannot. Erase." (it's worth noting that the musician himself handles most of the instruments), they certainly bring us back to the most inspired Wilson from a compositional perspective.

Within this work, the most remarkable elements are the more acoustic and less experimental passages, present in both tracks, which might even remind us of the best moments of Porcupine Tree or albums where the British artist served as producer, such as "Damnation" by Opeth.

I hope this return to the right path continues over time and that Steven Wilson keeps delivering music of this quality, whether under his name or that of Porcupine Tree.

A true surprise, indeed!

*In a moment of existential contemplation, this review was written simultaneously with Cosmic Cathedral's Deep Water. In a similar mode to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, the general theme here is existential understanding, big and small. Here Steven Wilson is thinking big, with terrifying consequences, and in the moments he thinks small, it's mostly to provide a context to properly consider the banality and unimportance of most of our thoughts and decisions. What we do doesn't really matter, and we need to determine what's important to us without religious or superstitious dogma to guide us, because those are only artifacts of the human tendency toward lazy and comforting thinking. Scientific advancement and understanding, and the determination to maintain a commitment to pursuing it, is the best we can do, even if it matters nothing to the universe itself. The fading red of the red pill observed at the heat death of the universe, so to speak.*

A throwback, 2001: A Space Odyssey-style interstellar journey to the end of the universe with Captain Steven Wilson? Yes.

A well-constructed, epic album culminating with a Cinema Show in space, with perhaps the sickest keyboardist I've ever heard in my life? Hell yes.

Lyrics that perhaps answer the question of what 70s Roger Waters would come up with if he read the 3 Body Problem and had a visceral premonition about the current rise of authoritarianism in the world? Let's freaking go!

Objects Outlive Us. When I first got this album in the mail, I had my family around, knowing it wouldn't be a perfect listening environment, and then made it worse when I played it through my TV soundbar. That is not an optimal way to experience this album, so say the least. Then, the first thing I heard was Steven Wilson's falsetto. I think it's a poor way to open an album, and it's the one thing I'd change about this song. The only other part that doesn't work for me is the heavy break in between the contemplative parts with Andy Partridge's lyrics--it seems a bit forced, and doesn't advance the song for me, which is unusual for anything Steven Wilson does.

Having said all that, this is a great track. When I crank it up in a proper setting, the layers, textures, and sound effects blow my mind. This isn't about virtuoso playing, but instead extending the boundaries of the tone and emotion of the instruments, with a song structure that emotionally progresses from existential dread to wonder (and disgust) of humanity to brief hopefulness (I think of broom boy in Star Wars when I hear the lyrics about the boy with the telescope) to beautiful (and terrifying) nothingness.

The Overview. I would say this baby is perfection: patient, adventurous, groundbreaking, thoughtful, and impactful. I like prog rock in general, but to me this is rare true progressive music.

The bottom line: Is this perfect? Close, but no, as explained above. Is this essential? For me, absolutely. Each listen gets better for me, and I keep finding new things to enjoy, from the writing, the playing, the mixing, and the larger ideas. I don't know about the Buddha of the Modern Age, but this is the Dark Side for my middle age.